BT and Dolby launch HD conferencing service

The BT Meet Me with Dolby Voice service is designed to significantly enhance existing conferencing systems and reinvent the conference call as a means of replicating a face-to-face conversation.

At the launch of the service in London’s BT Tower this morning, Howard Dickel, CEO of BT Conferencing, said: “We believe it’s going to change the way people communicate and we also think that BT Meet Me can be used for the kinds of meetings that would have been impossible in the past, like workshops, board meetings or brainstorming sessions.”

The service includes voice-separation software, in order to differentiate between participants, as well as high-fidelity audio technology to eliminate background noise and enhance clarification.

Dickel stressed that according to BT research, conferencing services saved businesses £683 million in travel costs last year alone, and the new service is designed to deliver a further cost-effective solution to conducting business.

Speaking exclusively to Capacity, Luis Alvarez, CEO of BT Global Services, said that the company has seen a huge increase in the number of customers using conference services over the last few years, and BT saw a gap in the market for a higher-quality offering.

“We thought there was an opportunity to invest in creating a solution in which the quality of the voice was the main driver. So to some extent this is 3D voice, high-definition voice and the first test we conducted with customers worked extremely well,” he said.

The service has been initially launched for use on the soft client (PCs, MACs, laptops etc.) but BT and Dolby plan to extend this to mobile users by the first quarter, and to conference phones by the first half of next year.

BT’s Meet Me service is designed to be accessible from any country in the world, across any IP network, but reportedly performs at its best when used over a BT-managed network.